Games, Entertainment, Geek Culture

5 Delayed Titles which Failed to Impress

Do good things come to those who wait?

With the rather lacklustre reviews of the severely delayed Crackdown 3, we at two beard gaming look at 5 other titles which took their time in getting to us and yet failed to deliver on the hype. I have purposely omitted Duke Nukem as everyone knows the mess that game became.

5. The Last Guardian

The people that brought us ICO and Shadow of the Colossus began work on The Last Guardian back in 2007, we had to wait 9 long years to get our hands on it and whilst it wasn’t terrible, it was severely broken with some unresponsive controls and an atrocious camera. Not what we expected from a quality team with a great deal of time.

4. Aliens: Colonial Marines

12 years, countless developers and a much-loved franchise. It could only go one way. Billed as a continuation of the Alien story set directly after Aliens, played out in the world of a first-person shooter. Expectations were high, the game was truly shite. One of the co-founders of TBG oddly ranks this as one of their most favourite games ever released (@lopezgreen).

3. A.P.B

Coincidentally this game was developed by Realtime Worlds, the developers who made the original Crackdown, led by the chap who brought us Lemmings and GTA. Conceived in 2005 and released on PC in 2010 it then took another 7 years to get to PS4. An online 3rd person cops and robbers game which was renowned for being unfinished it slumped in sales and saw the collapse of Realtime Worlds

2. Daikatana

Big headed self-absorbed John Romero was riding high from the success of Doom and Quake, so off he pops to set up Ion Storm and create his “masterpiece” Daikatana. 1997 conception to a 2000 delivery date doesn’t seem bad, however when John promised a turnaround of initially 7 months, 3 years seems a bit off the pace. Countless completion dates were missed, the game engine was changed from Quake to Quake 2, yet when it finally shipped Quake 3, which had just released made it look arse. Ion Storm collapsed and John disappeared into obscurity.

1. Spore

In many ways Spore suffered similarly to that of Daikatana. Being developed by Will Wright, the man who gave us SimCity and The Sims, Spore had high expectations indeed. The game started life (no pun intended) in 2000, finally reaching stores 7 years later. An ambitious project if nothing else. Take a single cell organism and progress through evolution to become a space conquering civilization. Played out as a different game genre through each stage of evolution, some sections were great, however the sum of its parts failed to deliver on its lofty ambitions. It became a dumbed down simplistic set of sub games which marred the one or two good sections.

What other games kept you waiting for an eternity only to let you down at the final hurdle? tell us in the comments section below, on Twitter or our Facebook page!